


direct connection

by sullypants



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Phone Sex, Phone sex operator AU, and thus fittingly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:48:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27179491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sullypants/pseuds/sullypants
Summary: It’s sixteen dollars per hour.That’s what Jughead thinks every time he finds himself a little out of his depth.Jughead, a phone sex worker, receives an unexpected proposition from an equally unlikely caller.
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 73
Kudos: 205
Collections: 8th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees, Riverdale Kink Week





	direct connection

**Author's Note:**

> With gratitude to arsenicpanda, who provided excellent feedback and thoughtful insight before, during, and after writing. 
> 
> Thanks also to theheavycrown for her prompt, and to stillscape for her risotto.

  
  


_art is nice but the question is how are you_

_making money are you for sale_

  
  
  
  
  
  


It’s sixteen dollars per hour.

That’s what Jughead thinks every time he finds himself a little out of his depth.

There was also a lot of potential for bonuses. If he kept callers on the line for more than ten minutes he’d earn twenty cents per additional minute. If he kept callers on the phone for _thirty_ minutes, that jumped to a _dollar_ per minute. 

If someone requested him by name? That was an extra two dollars from the jump.

Of course, it wasn’t really his name.

Sweet Pea? Sweet Pea had a deep baritone that their manager had ironically called a panty-dropper, never mind the fact that the gender breakdown of their clientele was—to Jughead’s casual, purely non-scientific observation—solidly mixed. 

Sweet Pea kept his client on the phone as though they were simply incapable of hanging up. Sweet Pea had _regulars_. It was technically against the rules to pre-schedule call time with clients, but Sweet Pea finagled something informal, and their manager looked the other way. He simply brought in too much money to protest. 

Sweet Pea’s record for call-length was—the very thought astounded Jughead—one hundred and eighty-eight minutes. 

Sweet Pea had told him that it hadn’t even involved any of what they euphemistically called ‘caller satisfaction’—a term that even featured in the employee handbook Jughead signed acknowledgment of when he was hired. 

Sweet Pea had simply chatted with his client for more than three hours, as the client had sat through a home viewing of _Top Gun_ and cooked dinner. 

So the money was pretty good, and the hours were undeniably perfect for him. He was an instinctual night owl, had arranged it so that all his workshops were scheduled for the afternoon, and could spend his evenings and nights—eight pm until three am, forty-five minutes for ‘lunch’—at this call center, a few times a week.

The stipend he got from his MFA program only covered so much of his living expenses. A job at the campus library? Wiping tables down at the diner where he abused the free coffee refills while he was working on his manuscript? Pennies, compared to this.

Who knew being a phone sex operator could be so lucrative. 

If he were any good at it. 

He’s not a natural actor.

He gets the mechanics—or rather, the mechanics are understandable to him.

Keep people on the line as long as possible. Talk, and get them to talk. (His job title is actually “talker.” The irony strikes him as almost _too_ good). Tell them what they want to hear—as long as that does not involve discussion of minors, non-consensual violence, or murder. 

Create your own character, he’d been told on that first day. Give yourself a name. 

That impulse, composing a backstory, came naturally to him. He’d even made himself laugh by contemplating using his own given name, before sobering quickly at the realization that it was rare enough to be instantly incriminating if, god forbid, someone he knew in-person ended up on the other end of the line. 

When he picked his name, he was surprised to learn that none of the other talkers had already claimed it. 

He knew he’d struggle with certain parts of this job. He just hoped he’d be able to let his survival instincts take over. That hourly wage was too good to pass up. 

Instincts, he’d thought. The prototypical first man somehow figured it out—why shouldn’t he? 

_Adam_ , he’d decided. 

Six months into the job, he’s only completed half of his manuscript’s second draft, and his record for longest phone call is a whopping twenty-four minutes. 

He’s not here to compete, so the good-natured ribbing he suffers at the hands of his coworkers doesn’t bother him. 

He doesn’t care if the photo on his building ID never gets blown up and taped to the wall in the conference room, where Employee of the Month portraits are lined up, matted onto multi-color construction paper like in an elementary school classroom.

Jughead is a writer. He’s always been a writer. He thinks better in sentences on a page, digital or physical, more than he ever has with his spoken words.

It strikes him as deeply ironic that as he’s working toward his MFA, as he’s trying to complete his manuscript—his first proper _book_ —he’s simultaneously trying to get by on his verbal acuity. 

He gets the logistics, he has the _words_ , he has his own—albeit semi-limited—sexual experience; but he can’t get out of his own head.

The call floor is dim, and the cubicles are decently spaced (“A caller should never be able to hear another talker in the vicinity,” read the manual.) 

The easiest calls are also the creepiest ones, although Jughead tries not to judge. Sometimes he’ll pick up a call that’s been funneled to him from Billing, and his caller will already be more than halfway to their own personal satisfaction. They won’t even speak to him, sometimes. These calls are the worst, but they’re also the shortest. There’s so little effort on his part with these calls, he hardly loses his flow in writing. 

(He technically isn’t supposed to multitask during work hours, but he dims his laptop as much as he is able without straining his eyes and hopes the privacy screen he slides over it during workshop does the rest. He keeps an eye out for his manager, but she keeps to a pretty regular schedule of rounds.) 

Six months past, he thinks he has heard it all, and to hear Sweet Pea speak of his own two years on the job, he’s that much more certain he truly has. 

But Jughead knows he should never count on consistency. Life is too untenable for that. 

The heels of his palms are pressing firmly into his eye sockets, his vision blurry and sore from staring too long at his laptop, hidden below the monitor of his work computer, when his dashboard dings with an incoming client, sent his way direct from Billing. 

“Hi, I’m Adam,” he answers. “What’s your name?”

“Hello, Adam, you’ll be speaking with Elizabeth.” 

A bright and haughty voice spikes down the line. “She’s never really done this sort of thing before,” the voice tells him, and Jughead notices the weight she seems to place on certain words, as though she’s trying to convey something to him without actually stating it. “But she’s having a _hard time_ right now, she simply _cannot_ get out of her own head, and she needs _someone to talk to_.” 

In the background, Jughead can faintly hear a voice that seems to be in the room with this caller, the voice of someone who sounds exasperated. 

“I have a therapist, Cheryl, she’s on maternity leave, I told you—”

There’s a noise as though the phone’s microphone is muffled, but he can still hear an emphatic _hush!_

Jughead has, by this point, simply come to appreciate that every call will either be exactly like the last, or so outré as to be absurd. There is no in-between. He can already tell this one will be one of the latter. 

That’s okay; he needs a break from simultaneously editing his manuscript and trying to fake being sexy over the phone. Maybe this wouldn’t even be one of those calls for which he’d dig into the back of his brain to remember whatever Henry Miller he’d read as an undergrad, or even those Joyce letters he’d stumbled across during a research spiral. 

(Now _those_ had been dirty. He wishes he’d taken better notes, but how could he have predicted he’d even need _that_ information one day? Hindsight.)

“Hello...Adam,” comes a new voice, and then he hears the first voice in the background, a sharp-sounding _Cousin_ , before the line is muffled yet again.

“Sorry!” says the second voice—Elizabeth. “My cousin is a bit...Well, she means well, but she can be a little much sometimes.”

“Right, I understand.”

(Jughead has no closely related cousins, so technically this is untrue. Most of his phone calls involve at least little untruth. He’s certainly never been described as a panty-dropper in his life, nor does he anticipate ever being so designated.) 

When Elizabeth falls silent again, Jughead kicks himself into gear.

“Your—cousin? Said you were having a hard time?”

He hears this woman exhale slowly.

“Yeah.” She's silent again, briefly. “It’s been a pretty busy few months at work, and well, my therapist is on maternity leave, and I broke up with my boyfriend, and it’s been busy, and I just…”

Jughead waits.

“It’s been a lot,” she finishes.

Jughead flips through his employee Bible to page 352, a script he knows almost verbatim by now.

“So you’re looking to relax a little?” he asks. “Find a little”—he cringes internally—“release.”

Elizabeth makes a small noise in agreement. “I suppose. Yes, I guess I just need to...talk it out.” Jughead hears a soft chuckle. “I’ve never done this with a random stranger on the phone before, though.”

Jughead follows the flow-chart of this very _adult_ Choose Your Own Adventure book to page 353.

“What do you like to do, Elizabeth?”

“Oh! Well. Well, admittedly I haven’t had much time for hobbies lately. I like to run. Last year I was training for a half-marathon, but then this project at work...But that’s an excuse. I guess it’s just an excuse.”

Jughead recalibrates, shifts back to page 352. _Be overt_.

“Well, what do you like? What makes you feel good?” He swallows, silently. 

“I’m a good baker. I read a lot of nonfiction.” Elizabeth offers.

Jughead looks at his timer: it’s been eight minutes, but it already feels like an hour. 

He inhales. _Fuck it_ , he thinks. Be direct. 

“Elizabeth, what do you like to do _in bed_?”

There’s a gasp down the line, and for a moment he wonders if this is part of a game, if this is a role play call and no one from Billing had given him the heads up. 

But then Elizabeth responds with a fairly indigent-sounding “Excuse me?” and he thinks yeah, Billing is definitely fucking with him here. He decides to cut bait. He’s at nine minutes thirty-nine seconds. 

“I’m sorry, I’m just trying to understand what you’re hoping to get out of our conversation,” he tells her.

“Out of our conv—I’m sorry?”

(Ten minutes.)

Before Jughead can respond—“ _Wait_. Wait, wait—what kind of call line is this?”

“I—” he begins, but before he can complete his sentence—

“Oh my _god_!”

And then the line goes dead.

A mere twenty-two minutes later, he’s been hung up on yet again (if in a more typical fashion) when he notices an alert from Billing. 

“Request - Adam,” it reads, and from the time-stamp he can see that this caller has been waiting no less than eight minutes. 

Jughead has never had a return caller before—not even by accident.

Two dollars, just like that, in his pocket.

Mildly confused, and without even scanning the notification to see who the caller is ( _foolish_ , he realizes almost immediately, but he’s had no practice for this eventuality), he adjusts his headset, clicks the button next to the blinking light, and says “Hello, this is Adam?”

“Oh!” The voice on the other end of the line is bright and familiar. “Hi—uh, hi, Adam, we spoke briefly not long ago. I hung up on you?”

“Oh. Elizabeth?” The call had been odd enough and recent enough to still be fresh in his brain. Had this call come tomorrow, he’s sure he’d have needed to fudge it. 

“Yes, well, I wanted to—oh, are you busy right now?” 

Jughead’s eyebrows furrow and his eyes scan his cubicle in confusion. Silence is not a recommended strategy for calls, but he’s never encountered one quite like this before. Thankfully, the voice—Elizabeth—continues.

“Wait, right. Well,” there’s a nervous sounding chuckle, and Jughead leans back in his desk chair. Elizabeth clears her throat. 

“So, from my conversation with billing, this phone number is now affiliated with the credit card used during our earlier call. Can you confirm that?”

“Uhh, yes? Yes, I think so,” he tries to convey with confidence. He still feels like he’s back on his heels, like he cannot quite catch up. 

“Ah. Okay, excellent. That’s good to know.” 

At this point, Jughead remembers he’s still working, and that not only did Elizabeth request him by name, he’s now been on the line with her for three minutes. Seven more and the bonus begins to kick in. 

“Listen,” Elizabeth begins. “I wanted to apologize for hanging up on you before. My cousin was playing a prank on me.”

_Light dawns on Marblehead_. Jughead begins to put the pieces together. 

“I didn’t know this was a—I didn’t realize you weren’t a _therapist_.”

Jughead feels himself grimace a little, but he remains silent as she continues.

“I’m sorry, because that means she sort of played a prank on you too, and I—wait. You weren’t in on this, were you?”

Jughead shakes his head at the empty cubicle. “No, no I was not.”

“No, I didn’t think so. Well, I’m sorry for being so rude. And I wonder if you could help me with a bit of...comeuppance?”

“Comeuppance?”

Elizabeth hesitates for a moment, before—

“My cousin’s credit card is attached to this phone number.” 

Jughead’s silent for a beat. Elizabeth is silent in turn. Jughead can see where this is going.

“I’m not really a prankster,” she continues, “and I’m _definitely_ not someone who would cause serious financial hardship to anyone for a laugh—but Cheryl can handle it.”

“Right. Okay. I see.” 

“Good! Okay, great.” She sounds pleased, and inanely Jughead is reminded of Mrs. Alden, his second grade teacher, and the smile she’d give him whenever he’d earned a gold star to put under his name on the bulletin board. There’s even the slightest twang of accomplishment in his chest. 

Still—he has questions. “And...how exactly would you like to...go about this?” 

“Oh. Well,” Jughead can practically hear her brain ticking down the line, “I’m about to cook some dinner and then I have some work to catch up on; can I steal, like, forty-five minutes of your time?”

A wash of anxiety courses through his biceps. Forty-five minutes is...a lot longer than any of his previous calls. 

“And what would you like me to _do_?” He’s not entirely sure what this Elizabeth is looking for, but she seems to get the drift of his question.

“Oh! _Oh_ —none of your regular...services, please,” she sounds slightly uncomfortable, and Jughead wonders who is more out of their element, he or she? 

“Do you,” she proposes, “want to hear about my dinner?”

Jughead learns a lot about making risotto that evening. 

It seems semi-laborious (there’s a lot of stirring). At one point, he tries to zone out, but the lilt of Elizabeth’s voice, its cadence, is difficult to ignore. It’s not irritating, just distracting.

“Is this boring for you? I’m so sorry,” she apologizes again.

“Oh, no, honestly. If anything it just makes me a little hungry. Really though, if I weren’t talking to you I’d probably just be editing my work.”

“Your work?” she inquires, and in the background he hears what sounds like a kitchen faucet running. 

Jughead bites the inside of his cheek, runs his hand over the cool aluminum of his laptop. 

“I’m...a writer. In real life.”

“Oh, no way!” There’s a clatter of metal on metal—maybe a pot into a sink. “Tell me about your writing.”

Thirty minutes later, Jughead has shared with Elizabeth the rough outline of his manuscript (very rough—he’s still wary of this phone call and this strange women), about the inane members of his workshop cohort (Bret had featured heavily in his complaints, but he thinks he held off the full rant he knew himself capable of), and even about the curious legend of Mr. Chipping—no names mentioned of course—rumored to have defenestrated out of a window on the humanities building’s third floor years ago, only to haunt the MFA students with writer's block and misused punctuation. 

By the time he’s finished, he feels parched. He reaches for the thermos of water he keeps in his messenger bag, and realizes he doesn’t usually talk this much. But Elizabeth had so naturally encouraged a conversation. He thinks _she_ might have a better skill at this job than him, and tells her so. It makes her laugh, and it sounds like a true laugh—a soft bark, almost a huff, a hint of irony in her throat. It’s elegant. 

“Is your name really Adam?” she asks. 

Jughead pauses. “No.”

“Honestly, I’m kind of glad to hear it. My ex’s name was—well, is, Adam. I don’t suppose there’s anything else I could call you?”

He freezes just as he’s about to tell her _Jughead_ ; he realizes that might be unwise. He considers telling her his _real_ real name, before immediately nixing it as too rare. He’s met only two other Forsythes in his life and he’s related to both of them. Panicking, worried his silence has grown lengthy and telling, he blurts out, “Pen,” grimacing once he realizes that is equally as absurd an offering, however true it might be. 

“Penn? Like the university?” There’s a hint of doubt in her words, but it’s so subtle he’s not sure he hasn’t imagined it.

“Yes—Penn like the university.” _Or Pendleton_ , he does not add. 

“Oh, that’s a coincidence—I went to UPenn. My name is Be— _th_.” Well, he’d certainly been a little more subtle than _that_ , surely. 

“Nice to meet you, Beth,” he offers before the silence can grow too uncomfortable.

“Thanks, Penn.” 

“Do you cook?”

This is how their third conversation hits its stride. 

Beth clearly loves to cook, or maybe it’s just that most of their conversations seem to happen soon after she’s gotten home from work. Typically his shift is still young, and he listens to Beth prepare herself dinner. 

Jughead loves to eat. He tells Beth as much.

He also tells her that there’s nothing in life he appreciates so much as a perfectly cooked burger, and that if left to his own devices, he’d probably let himself survive on an American classic for every meal.

Beth had been silent for a beat, before asking him, with apparent sincerity: “Do you worry about scurvy?”

He’d laughed. 

“Ugh, honestly—I hate that word,” she groans, and Jughead doesn’t stifle his laugh.

“Pussy? You hate the word _pussy_ ,” he drawls, and when he feels his cheeks ache he realizes he’s smiling. He’s teasing her, and she’s being teased, and he likes making her laugh. 

Beth had—over her stove, she told him, making a late dinner—asked him to tell her about his job, and he’d started by mincing words.

She’d quickly cut him off. “No, no—tell me straight. I can handle it, warts and all. I’m actually super curious—I work in journalism, I like seeing the behind the scenes stuff.”

And so Jughead had reached under his desk for the Bible—the three-ring binder of training scripts his manager had presented him on his first day, with the promise that he’d get the hang of it in no time, so soon he wouldn’t even need the binder.

All these months later and the pages are worn and dogeared, there are post-it notes leading him to key pages, and he hasn’t worked a single shift without consulting it. 

He’d begun to read one such script to Beth, and she’d—to his surprise and delight—begun to offer him _edits_. 

“Pussy” had stopped her short though. 

“It’s the worst,” she exclaims. “My college ex used to use it in—you know, even though I always told him I hated it.”

“He didn’t listen?”

Beth scoffs. “Unfortunately, no. He wasn’t a very good boyfriend.” Jughead can hear her faucet running, what might be the sound of a dishwasher opening, the clatter of cutlery, and closing again. “Communication is important, right?” A soft huff in the background calls to mind a living room, a couch, an orange cat slinking past. “I even gave him clear instructions about what I did like. What I preferred.”

“Like what?” he asks without a thought. 

“ _Cunt_ ,” Beth responds near instantly, and suddenly Jughead feels like his heart has skipped a beat, as he hears an intake of sharp breath down the line.

This is how the weeks pass.

He sleeps until late morning, he rolls out of bed and heads to his workshop. 

He writes a bit, revises a bit, eats dinner, and heads to work.

Then he talks to Beth.

They talk cinema. 

(She has little patience for his youthful infatuation with Bergman—someone he pretended to understand but never truly did—and he cannot fault her this. 

“I was a teenage snob,” he says, and she laughs.

“Was?”)

Sometimes they talk books. 

(They have some overlap, even if he’s more into fiction and Beth seems to love creative non-fiction.

“And poetry,” she tells him. “Sometimes that’s what I love most, but I’d probably never admit it.”)

Beth tells him her thoughts on _Lovecraft Country_. 

(He hasn’t yet been able to mooch Archie’s HBO Max password off of him, but he’s interested enough in her thoughts that he’s convinced he ought to try a little harder.

“Gory,” she says, “Coen-esque sort of gory.”

That intrigues.)

Eventually he realizes speaking with Beth has become one of the best parts of his day. 

He begins to tell her about his work—his _real_ work—in greater detail. He’s honest with her about his MFA program, about his manuscript, about what he wants it to be, something more than just a collection of words. 

He wants it to mean something. He knows, intellectually-speaking, that the person he really needs to please is himself. No one’s satisfaction with his writing is more important.

But.

But there’s a part of him that craves the approval of _someone_ else. He’s not sure who, exactly—but it’s someone. 

( _Maybe that’s just another way of being lonely_ , he muses.)

He wants that someone to read _his_ words, to see things in them that he himself might have missed. He wants them to like it. He wants his book—god-willing he gets it published—to be _someone’s_ favorite book. 

Sometimes the feedback in his workshop feels shallow, ill-considered; sometimes it’s just flat-out unhelpful. There’s a lot of posturing among his cohort. 

When he tells Beth this, she convinces him to read his latest chapter to her, down the line.

She is patient as he reads to her, quietly. 

Her feedback feels fresh, and honest. In fact it’s almost a little _too_ honest. Jughead thinks if he were younger, her honesty might smart a bit. 

But right now, when he’s faced with Bret Weston Wallis’s smug mug and vacuous little asides weekly, Beth’s words are a gust of air in the depths of a cave long cut off from the surface. 

He tells her this.

She seems pleased. 

“Try me,” she tells him, and for a moment the instruction doesn’t register.

“Excuse me?” he asks, if only to give himself time to think.

She’s quiet down the line, but only for a beat. 

“Try me. Talk to me like you would a—a client,” she says quietly. “Please.” 

Jughead breathes in slowly through his nose, and realizes he’s moved so quickly past entertaining this request and on toward considering how to execute it, he might as well have whiplash. 

This night has taken a turn.

Beth had called much later than she usually did. Jughead thought perhaps she might even not call; they didn’t speak every day. 

Shortly after midnight, his dashboard had dinged. 

She’d gone on a date, she told him.

It was with a “guy who worked in finance.” Someone her cousin had set her up with. 

It’d made her sad, she said. 

“I haven’t really dated much since Adam,” she says. 

Then: this.

Jughead doesn’t... _do_ phone sex. Or he hasn’t. Outside of work. And _inside_ of work, he’s not an actual participant in the pleasure of his clients. It’s never been about self-titillation, and that had been clear from his first day, reading over his new employee paperwork in the conference room. He’d signed a very clear sexual harassment policy. He’s an adult. He’s not about to get himself off at work.

But he very much wants to get Beth off. 

He wants to hear her moan and he wants to hear her come and he wants it even if it’s only ever through the tinny speaker of a landline. 

He doesn’t recognize this want. He’s been single since he broke up with his last girlfriend, almost two years ago, and he hasn’t had sex with anyone since—besides himself, he supposes. He’d never much wanted to, and certainly not with a stranger or a random woman he met in a bar (not that he much went in for bars). 

Her voice breaks him out of his thoughts. 

“How would you start?”

How indeed? 

“I’d ask you your name,” he tells her. He swallows. His heart feels hummingbird-fast. “And I’d tell you mine.” But they’d done this part already, many weeks earlier.

“My name is Betty,” she says, and Jughead feels himself smile.

“My name is Jughead.”

“It’s nice to meet you, _Jughead_.” It isn’t teasing—at least, not like an elementary school bully. This is different. 

“It’s nice to meet you, too.” He runs his nail along the seam of his jeans methodically, like he does during feedback in workshop. Then, he’s not allowed to talk. Now... “How are you feeling?” he asks.

This is patently _not_ how most of his calls operate, but he doesn’t dwell on the thought. He realizes he’s holding his breath, for fear it will drown out her response. 

But he hears her huff a quiet laugh. There’s a sound of shuffling, and Jughead imagines she’s settled herself someplace soft—her sofa, her bed. 

( _Don’t think of her bed._ )

“I…” she begins. Jughead is silent. “I’ve had one glass of wine,” and then it is his turn to laugh.

“Good,” he tells her. “Can you tell me what you’re doing?”

Betty ( _not Beth, her name is Betty_ ) sighs contentedly. “Well, I’m talking to you”—he swears he can hear her smile, and it feels like a reminder that this is not a stranger—“and I’m lying in my bed. I just fed my cat.”

Jughead pauses. “Is your cat with you now?”

“No, no. She won’t deign to acknowledge my existence for another hour or two, at least. It’s how we share space.” 

“Good. Okay,” he tells her. “What do you like to do, Betty?” The question comes to him without prompting; no sooner has he thought the words is he speaking them out loud. This is not like his other phone calls. His mind is blank, but he also feels focused. 

“ _Well_ ,” she draws out slowly, “I like talking to you? I like...reading. I like reading in bed. I like sex?”

Betty is teasing him, and he feels a smile spread across his face. “Is that a question?”

“No, that’s not a question.” 

“What are you wearing, Betty?” he asks, and his boldness shocks him. This is not the first time he has spoken these words in this very cubicle, but suddenly they feel taboo. 

Betty is silent for a moment, and he briefly panics ( _this is a mistake_ ), before—“I’m wearing my bathrobe.” 

Jughead pulls his rolling chair closer to his desk, and leans over to rest his forehead in his palm. He closes his eyes, and concentrates on the feel of the speaker against his ear. 

“Can you take it off for me?”

She responds non-verbally (a short _mhmm_ ), and Jughead hears a slight shuffle. 

“How…” he begins, “how does your neck feel?” 

“My neck?” she questions.

“Yes.” _Start small_ , he tells himself. 

“My neck is…smooth. Soft. I can feel my pulse.” 

Her voice is thoughtful. He tries to imagine the arc of her throat, how it might vibrate softly under her fingertips. 

He’s not sure he can summon the image, and this void distracts him. He rubs his palm across his forehead. 

“Jug?” she asks, and he focuses on the timbre of her voice. _Betty_.

“Good,” he finally responds. “Can you...run your hand over your collarbone? Over your sternum?”

“Yes.”

“What does it feel like?”

“It’s cold.”

“Cold?” 

(In a flash of panic, he considers the Bible, just below his desk.)

She makes a sound in agreement. “I took a shower.”

“Okay.” He breaths in through his nose, and out through his mouth. “Run your hand down your chest for me, please.” 

He listens carefully to the sound of Betty’s soft breath; a deep inhale, a slow exhale. He waits for her to speak.

“Soft,” she tells him, “cool.” 

“Good.” He feels his head nod into his palm, and he squeezes his eyes hard. 

“It’s nice, Jughead. It’s nice talking to you.”

Jughead opens his eyes and stares down at the plastic surface of his desk, at his keyboard, at his closed laptop to the side. They’re there, but he doesn’t really see them. “It’s nice talking to you too, Betty.” 

( _It is_ , he thinks.)

His heart races. He wonders if the double espresso he’d had after dinner had perhaps been one too many. Jughead shifts gently in his chair and tries to catch up with his train of thought, racing far ahead of him. 

“Place your hand on your hip, please,” he tells her.

Betty is silent. Jughead can only hear the sound of her breath, the soft _shush_ of her arm (he imagines) against her sheets. 

“I think I want you, Jug.” 

Jughead realizes his leg is bouncing rapidly, and he’s not sure how long it has been. He forcefully places his palm onto his knee to still it, and it eventually falls under order. 

“Can you touch your cunt, Betty?” he asks, and he hears her sharp inhale. “For me?” 

She doesn’t answer him, but he continues. “Are you wet?”

His knee is alive again, and his palm rests uselessly upon it, when he finally hears her, “Yes.” 

“Good. That’s good.” (He breathes in through his nose, out through his mouth.) 

“Can you imagine my hand, Betty?” (His knee bounces, up-and-down.) “That my hand is touching you?” 

“Yes,” she tells him, and something is suddenly different. Her voice is almost husky when she tells him, “I can feel your hand on me.”

His spine feels warm. He tugs the collar of his sweater away from his body, tucks his palm against the back of his neck. “That’s good, Betty. What does it feel like?”

“It feels…it feels good.”

“ _You_ feel good, Betty,” he tells her, and somehow he _knows_ it. He believes it. “Your skin is cool. May I put my fingers inside you, Betty?” he asks, and she gasps. He continues without waiting for her response. “You feel—warm.” 

Her breath sounds shallower, and his knee continues its erratic dance. He watches it until he tears his eyes away and closes them again. His trousers feel tight, but he pulls in a deliberate breath and tries to calm himself, tries to focus on Betty’s breathing instead of how he feels. 

“Can I put my mouth on your breast, Betty?” and her _yes_ is more noise than vocalization. 

“Can you come with my hand inside of you, and my mouth on your breast?” he asks her. “Can you come for me, Betty?” 

And soon—she does.

He waits for the sound of her breath to calm, and slowly his knee begins to cease its dance. He swallows the saliva that has pooled under his tongue, breathes deeply, runs his palms down the length of his thighs and back up again. 

Betty is silent, so he is silent. 

“Can I—” she begins. Jughead’s breath is loud in his ear (or is it her breath? Maybe both of their breaths?)

“What?”

“Can I send you a picture?”

Jughead's heart feels like it swings a loop around his spine, and he breathes heavily through his nose. 

He stares over the partition wall of his cubicle, into the distance, staring at a spot where the wall of the room meets the ceiling. Logically, he knows there are other people on this floor, but the room is so silent, all he can hear is air circulating in and out of lungs and the white noise pumped in through little speakers in the dropped-ceiling tiles. 

“Okay,” he says and slowly, quietly, recites his cell number.

He can sense rather than hear the soft buzz of his cell phone, from where it sits in his bag, at his feet. 

She’s still quiet down the line as he leans to reach into the pocket of his bag. Elbows on his knees, forehead resting on the edge of his desk, Jughead opens his messaging app, clicking through to read a message from an unknown number. 

There’s just a photograph, no message at all, and the image is of a woman. He cannot see her face, but he can see her. 

He sees the line of her clavicle under her skin, the soft-round swoop and curve where her waist flares to her hip. He notices a rosy flush across the top of her chest, the small nest of curls between her thighs, the rosy tinge of her areolae.

He breathes in through his nose and out through his lungs, and stares at this photo of this woman to whom he is speaking, with whom he has been speaking, for however many weeks it has been.

He is silent, and for the first time in a long time, it is not because he does not know what to say, but rather that he is afraid to say it. He cannot consult a script in the Bible for what exactly this is. He’s pretty sure this exact scenario is verboten, but there’s another part of him that couldn’t give less of a fuck.

“Do you like it?” she asks him, and he nods until he remembers she cannot see him, that they are not in the same room, that they have never actually met. 

“Yes,” he says, “I like it. Thank you.” 

Betty doesn’t call again for five days, and he stresses.

He worries it went too far. He worries that _he_ went too far.

But this is his job; technically, he was _doing his job_. 

( _This is different, though_ , he does not let himself think.)

He just didn’t anticipate enjoying his job, or enjoying his frequent conversations with Beth—Betty, and he didn’t anticipate missing them when suddenly they ceased.

But then, on a Tuesday—it’s her.

Adam gets a request, and he knows, just _knows_ , without looking at it. 

When he says “Hello,” Betty greets him with a bright and cheerful “Hi!” 

He tells her about Bret’s latest cliche-ridden short story, and she tells him about the city councillor she hunted down for a quote on school redistricting. 

Things are normal—whatever normal might be—for one more week, before she tells him.

“My cousin got her credit card statement,” Betty tells him.

“Oh. Oh! How’d she take it?”

“Mission accomplished, I’d say,” she sounds pleased with herself, but there’s also a tone to her voice, like there’s something she isn’t saying. 

“Hope the damage wasn’t too bad.”

“Honestly, I wish it were more,” she tells him, and he laughs.

They’re silent together, for a moment.

And then Betty tells him, “Thanks for your help, Jughead.”

His feet feel heavy, and his biceps ache with useless adrenaline. 

“I really liked talking with you,” she tells him, and Jughead nods into the emptiness of his cubicle.

He has her cell number, he realizes.

He has her cell number, and a picture of her naked torso.

_Is it creepy if he texts her_ , he wonders.

He decides _yes, it is_.

He hopes that she decides differently, and texts him. 

She does not text him.

He does not text her.

Toni convinces him to be social.

He realizes it’s been a lonely two weeks, and he’s not entirely sure why. 

He’s gone to workshop, he’s gone to work. He’s written, he’s edited. 

(It’s not Betty, or rather lack of Betty. _That’d be ridiculous_ , he thinks.)

But perhaps twice a year, his friends convince him to come to a party for some reason or another, and this time it’s because Toni wants him to meet her new girlfriend.

Toni opens the door for him, and pulls him into her apartment’s entry hall. He can see a dense crowd of people in her living room, but he can’t hear them over the stereo, over the sound of Wilson Pickett crooning, _I hope that you’ll understand_. 

“You’re late,” she tells him, without even a hello, and he hands his coat into her waiting hand.

“I was finishing some work,” he says, and stoically ignores the eye roll she throws him as she hangs his coat among the many, many others that hide her coat stand. 

“C’mon,” she bobs her head toward her kitchen door, “I want you to meet her.”

“Are you sure she wants to meet me?”

“Shut up, Jones.”

Toni’s new girlfriend is a giant—or rather a woman of average height in a pair of towering red heels. Jughead is eye-level with the hawk-eye gaze with which she traces his figure. 

She haughtily throws a pre-Raphaelite amount of red waves over her shoulder and tells him it’s a “pleasure.” He thinks she’s obviously caging her true feelings toward him (disdain, he assumes), but Toni is glowing in this siren’s very presence, so he plays nice and returns the platitude. There’s something familiar about this woman, but he’s certain he’d remember seeing her before (this much red hair is hard to miss). 

“Oh,” Toni tells him, “you should meet Cheryl’s cousin, too; she’s here,” and after a quick scan of the crowd, Toni waves at a flash of blonde hair that he glimpses only briefly, before socializing bodies hide her again. 

He turns back to Toni as Cheryl pours a glass of wine. As she tops off the glass and hands it to him, she raises her eyebrows to indicate over his shoulder. “This is my cousin.” 

He sips from the glass as he turns to a woman with golden hair and bright green eyes. He does not know her, but she smiles at him, and something swoops in his stomach.

“Cousin Betty, this is Toni’s bon ami, Forsythe.”

Cousin Betty’s eyes meet his—and he _knows_.

“Hi,” she says, as she reaches her palm to meet his own in the air between them. “I’m Betty.” 

“Hello,” he tells her. “I’m Jughead.” Her hand is warm in his, and he can feel his smile in his cheeks, and he thinks it’s probably a lot like the one that paints Betty’s face as she looks up at him. 

(He overhears her cousin—Cheryl, he remembers—leaning close to Toni and speaking in a distinct non-whisper, “The hobo, really? Cousin Betty is so ridicu—” before her girlfriend shushes her.)

“It’s nice to meet you, Betty.” 

And she beams. 

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Epigraph is from Morgan Parker’s poem [“Welcome to the Jungle”](https://www.howlnewyork.com/post/poets-corner-welcome-to-the-jungle-by-morgan-parker) from her collection _There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé_. 
> 
> Title is from the Kinks’ “Party Line.”
> 
> Please know the restraint I exhibited in not naming this story “Star-69.” Please appreciate this.
> 
> Everything I know about phone sex workers I learned from Gabourey Sidibe's memoir, but all interpretations or errors are, obv, my own.


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